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Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School DesegregationMain MenuBusing before "Busing"The Origins of Antibusing Politics in 1950s New YorkAntibusing Provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1964The Myth of De Facto SegregationCivil Rights Activism in the NorthNews Media & Civil Rights in the NorthFederal Surrender in ChicagoRichard Nixon's Antibusing PresidencyIrene McCabe's Mothers' March to WashingtonThe Complexity of Black Views on “Busing”Moving Beyond "Common Ground"Making "Busing" About the Rights of Black StudentsMatthew F. Delmont5676b5682f4c73618365582367c04a35162484d5

Introduction

In the decades after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, "busing" to achieve school desegregation became one of the nation’s most controversial civil rights issues. Why Busing Failed examines the pitched battles over "busing" at a national scale, and shows how school officials, politicians, the courts, and the media gave precedence to the desires of white parents who opposed school desegregation over the civil rights of black students.

My goal in writing Why Busing Failed is to change how we talk about and teach the history of "busing" for school desegregation. Rather than using "busing" as a politically neutral word, we need to understand that this term developed as a selective way to label and oppose school desegregation. My hope is that by seeing the history of "busing" clearly and speaking honestly about the history of civil rights, people who care about educational equality can chart a more just future. This companion website—drawing on images, video clips, and other research materials from Why Busing Failed—highlights new ways to teach the history of "busing."

12 WAYS TO TEACH "BUSING" DIFFERENTLY

1) Talk about busing to maintain segregated schools before "busing" Millions of students rode school buses to school before "busing" became a political issue. More importantly, school buses had long been used in the South and as well as New York, Boston, and many other northern cities, to maintain segregation. Students rode buses past closer neighborhood schools to more distant segregated schools. Read more...

2) Start in 1950s New York rather than 1970s BostonWhile most people associate "busing" with Boston in the mid-1970s, the battles over "busing" first emerged in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. Resistance to school desegregation developed alongside civil rights protests in New York in the decade after Brown, with white parents and politicians first objecting to rumored plans to bus students between Harlem and Staten Island and then organizing rallies to oppose plans to transfer students between predominantly black and Puerto Rican schools and white schools. Read more...

3) Study the antibusing provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1964The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was landmark legislation that promoted racial equality, but it also included language added by Northern congressmen that drew a sharp distinction between segregation by law in the South and so-called "racial imbalance." These amendments and antibusing provisions were designed to keep federal civil rights enforcement of school desegregation focused away from the North, and white politicians and parents in Boston, Chicago, New York and elsewhere regularly pointed to the 1964 Civil Act to justify the maintenance of white schools. Read more...

4) Discard the myth of de facto segregationWhile civil rights advocates initially promoted a distinction between “southern-style” and “northern-style” segregation to build a political consensus against Jim Crow laws in the South, the de jure–de facto dichotomy ultimately made it possible for public officials, judges, and citizens in both North and South to deny legal responsibility for the visible realities of racial segregation. Over the past two decades scholars have revealed the vast web of governmental policies that produced and maintained racially segregated neighborhoods and schools in the North, as well as highlighting the civil rights activists who fought against these structures of racial discrimination. These studies provide overwhelming evidence that, in every region of the country, neighborhood and school segregation flowed from intentional public policies, not from innocent private actions or free-market forces. Read more...

5) Feature civil rights activism in the North Civil rights activists, parents, and students in Northern cities were organized, creative, and persistent in their protests of school segregation and educational inequality. In cities like Boston, Chicago, and New York, civil rights advocates lobbied school officials, filed lawsuits, and organized massive school boycotts in the 1960s. Once the school desegregation story became framed around “busing” and “white backlash” in the late 1960s, it was easy to forget that black people and their allies had fought for years to secure equal education or that powerful local officials underwrote school segregation in the North. Read more...

6) Describe how the news media covered civil rights differently in the North and SouthThe news media’s support for the Southern civil rights movement is one of the iconic stories we tell about race in America, but it is limited and limiting story. If television was successful in framing the southern civil rights struggle as a moral imperative, the news media did not present civil rights activity in the North with the same moral clarity. Whereas television helped underscore the urgency of the black civil rights movement in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, by the mid-1960s and 1970s white “antibusing” protestors received the vast majority of media attention. Whatever praise television news personnel deserve for advancing civil rights in the South must be tempered by the fact that television news advanced the resistance to school desegregation as a national story with the same vigor. Read more...

7) Examine how one week in Chicago changed the history of school desegregationTitle VI of the Civil Rights Act gave the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) authority to withhold funds if school districts failed to comply with rules against school segregation. In 1965, HEW briefly withheld $30 million in federal funds from Chicago, finding the city’s schools to be in “probable noncompliance” with Title VI’s antidiscrimination provision. Facing pressure from Mayor Richard J. Daley, Senator Everett Dirksen, Illinois congressmen, and President Lyndon Johnson, HEW’s case in Chicago quickly unraveled, despite overwhelming evidence that Chicago school officials were not innocent bystanders to the creation and maintenance of racially differentiated schools. HEW’s surrender in Chicago encouraged school officials and politicians in other cities to maintain positions of resistance and noncompliance with regard to “busing” and school desegregation. Read more...

8) Talk about Richard Nixon's antibusing presidency President Richard Nixon leveraged the presidency’s unique political power and media platform to limit “busing” for school desegregation. Through television addresses, policy statements, and press releases, the Nixon administration shaped the debate over “busing” and normalized resistance to federal courts’ school desegregation orders. The president reined in the lawyers and officials working in the Justice Department and HEW who were on the frontline of enforcing (or not enforcing) school desegregation policies. Nixon also worked to bend the judiciary to his views on school desegregation and “busing,” appointing a record number of federal judges and four Supreme Court justices. Nixon’s appointees were in the majority in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), which overturned a lower court and blocked a metropolitan desegregation plan that would have involved Detroit and its suburbs. Read more...

9) Show how antibusing activists made savvy use of news media to oppose "busing"While thousands of parents across the nation raised their voices against “busing,” none received the same level of national television attention as Pontiac mother Irene McCabe. Though McCabe did not have any formal media training, she proved skillful at making her National Action Group protests into television-friendly events. More than simply an example of white backlash to civil rights, McCabe learned from other protest movements, creating television-ready scenes that garnered attention and framed her cause in a favorable light. Most notably, McCabe led a group of “marching mothers” on a 620-mile march from Pontiac to Washington, DC, in support of an “antibusing” constitutional amendment. Read more...

10) Explore what "busing" meant to black communitiesBlack students, parents, and activists fought tirelessly for decades to improve the educational options in majority-black schools, but school desegregation plans too often led to negative outcomes for black students and teachers. Black students in recently desegregated schools were disproportionately suspended and pushed out of school; many black teachers and administrators lost their jobs; formerly black schools were closed; and one-way “busing” plans asked black students to travel far from their neighborhoods in. For these reasons black communities were often ambivalent regarding “busing.” The various responses and alternatives black people offered were largely ignored by white media and politicians, who instead focused on more adamantly “antibusing” black viewpoints. Read more...

11) Move beyond Common GroundAs I have talked with people over the past six years about my research, the book that comes up most frequently is J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985). Lukas’s best-selling, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning story, more than any other work, has shaped popular views of the history of “busing.” Black civil rights activists in Boston, however, greeted Common Ground with anger and frustration Longtime Boston civil rights activist Ruth Batson, for example, described Lukas as a “faulty historian” and said pushing back against Common Ground is “like swimming against a strong tide...like being in a large crowd, trying to reach a destination, advancing twenty steps and being pushed back forty steps.” Read more...

12) Emphasize the rights of black students rather than the feelings of white people “Busing” for school desegregation was about the constitutional rights of black students, but the story of “busing” has been told and retold as a story about the feelings and opinions of white people. Reading the court decisions that led to court -ordered “busing” in cities like Pontiac and Boston makes it clear that years of educational discrimination preceded the court orders and can help to re-center the story of school desegregation on black students. Read more...

Why Busing Failed

“Busing” is commonly taught at the high school and college levels by focusing on Boston’s in the mid-1970s, but long history of “busing” for school desegregation is more nuanced, complicated, and important than any one city’s “busing crisis.” Getting the history of “busing” right is important because it enables us to see more clearly how school segregation and educational inequality continued in the decades after Brown. The majority of white Americans never supported civil rights if it meant confronting or overturning the structures of racial discrimination that created and maintained segregated schools and neighborhoods. The battle over “busing” exposed this truth. The news media, lauded for its coverage of civil rights in the South, described civil rights advocates who called for school desegregation in the North “extremists” and shored up the myth that segregation in the North was innocent rather than the product of decades of local, state, and federal policies.

Scholars have shown that school desegregation was an educational success in that it provided opportunities to black students without diminishing opportunities for white students. These potential gains were limited, however, because “busing” came to dominate the national debate on school desegregation. For over half a century, parents, school officials, politicians, and writers from across the political spectrum have described “busing” as unrealistic, unnecessary, and unfair. “Busing” is so routinely described as having failed that we have lost sight of what this equation—“busing failed”—asks us to believe about the history of civil rights in the United States. Agreeing that “busing failed” makes it possible to dismiss the educational goals which were a pillar of the civil rights movement and the constitutional promise of equality endorsed by, but never fully realized after, Brown. The “busing failed” narrative is comforting because it authorizes people to accept the continuing racial and socioeconomic segregation of schools in the United States as inevitable and unchangeable. Why Busing Failed shows that national resistance to school desegregation was immense but not inevitable. My hope is that dislodging the “busing failed” narrative and understanding the specific choices Americans made to thwart school desegregation leads to a more honest understanding of the history of civil rights.